Yzak Joule
Yzak Joule is a supporting protagonist, the newly-assigned Commanding Officer of the next-generation assault carrier ''Minerva''. A second-generation Coordinator whose mother sits on the PLANT Supreme Council, Yzak is fiercely proud of his elite status, Yzak is also a decorated veteran of the First Junius War, and is dedicated to the protection of the PLANTs. He maintains a friendly rivalry with fellow veteran Athrun Zala. Yzak is also an accomplished mobile suit pilot, who pilots a ZGMF-1000 ZAKU Warrior, then a ZGMF-2000 GOUF Ignited, and finally a YMF-3000 DOM Trooper Personality Of the five young academy graduates to have served on the Le Creuset Team, Yzak is the one who was most loyal to the PLANTs, but also the most unpredictable. He was competitive - especially towards Athrun, whom he saw as a rival, hotheaded, and extremely impulsive. The years and his experiences during the war have tempered Yzak's fiery disposition, and though he remains prone to short bursts of anger, he is on the whole more level-headed than he was in the past. His relationship with Athrun has also evolved to a less hostile rivalry, and while he would never openly admit it to anyone, Yzak respects Athrun for his skills and the actions he undertook at the end of the First Junius War. Skills & Capabilities Yzak is a top-notch pilot and a close-quarters combat specialist. During the First Junius War, as the pilot of the X102 Duel he often engaged his opponent - the X105 Strike - with nothing more than his beam sabers. The later addition of the heavy Assault Shroud forced him, while on Earth, to adopt a more long-range, supporting style of combat, though as soon as he returned to space near the war's end he returned to focusing heavily on close-range attacks. History Yzak is the son of Ezalia Joule, a prominent member of the Zodiac Alliance and supporter of Patrick Zala, both then and later as a member of the PLANT Supreme Council's National Defense Committee after the Zodiac Alliance was reorganized as ZAFT, the PLANTs' militia. Born in Martius City, he enlisted into ZAFT and entered the Academy at the same time as Patrick Zala's son Athrun. Fiercely competitive, Yzak saw Athrun as a rival, an opinion that endured past their graduation and into their assignment, along with Yzak's best friend Dearka Elsman and two others - Nicol Amalfi and Rusty Mackenzie. Except for Rusty, all of them had parents on the Supreme Council. When the Le Creuset Team launched their raid on the secret mobile suit factory installed by Morgenröte in the Orb colony Heliopolis, Yzak led Dearka and Nicol to capture three of the prototypes while Athrun and Rusty continued on to locate the other two. Yzak appropriated the first of the series, the GAT-X102 Duel, and would pilot it in the subsequent pursuit of the enemy warship ''Archangel''. Yzak would find himself engaged multiple times by the Strike's pilot, who in one battle would score a hit on the Duel's cockpit, damaging it and injuring Yzak, who would bear a long scar on his face from that encounter. He vowed that he would keep the scar until avenging his humiliating defeat at the Strike's hands. The Duel would subsequently be fitted with a custom Assault Shroud, developed from similar equipment created by ZAFT for the mass-production GINN and CGUE mobile suits. In the next battle, the added firepower would serve Yzak well, though he would once again find himself facing Kira. During the battle, a shuttle launched from the Alliance vessel Menelaos passed in between Yzak and his quarry. Assuming the shuttle contained the evacuating crew of the ship and enraged at what he perceived to be the Naturals' cowardice as well as their blocking him from attacking the Strike, he gunned the shuttle down as it entered the atmosphere. It was only much later that a horrified Yzak would learn he had murdered over a hundred civilian refugees in cold blood. During this battle, both Yzak and Dearka's machines were caught in Earth's gravity well and fell through the atmosphere, landing in the North African desert. Temporarily placed under the command of Andrew Waltfeld, both Yzak and Dearka would launch against the Archangel against orders in a battle between the ship and ZAFT. Because neither machine was properly calibrated for combat on Earth, Yzak would find himself unable to engage efficiently. The death of mutual friend Nicol at Kira's hands would further intensify Yzak's resolve to revenge himself upon the Strike's pilot, and like Athrun he vowed to kill the one responsible, though it is apparently Athrun who does so. Dearka meanwhile is shot down and captured by the Archangel, and with Athrun missing, Yzak is the only one of the four that remains. Athrun is later recovered alive, and reassigned to the special forces reporting directly to the Supreme Council. Before Athrun leaves to return to the PLANTs and despite the tension between them, the two shake hands, and Yzak states firmly that next time it will be he who is in charge, and demands that Athrun stay alive until then. Though he is not aware that they are one and the same, Yzak would encounter Kira again during Operation Spit-Break, when the latter, piloting the stolen Freedom Gundam, incapacitates the Duel and insists that Yzak leave before the Alliance's Cyclops System activates, killing them all. As a result, Yzak is among the survivors. His next sortie is during the Battle of Panama, and it is there that what he sees - the glee with which his fellow soldiers mercilessly slaughter the defenseless Alliance pilots, their machines incapacitated by ZAFT's Gungnir EMP weapon - disgusts Yzak, and as a result he starts to have doubts about the fanaticism that is increasingly prevalent in ZAFT. Those doubts are further intensified when at the Mendel colony he meets Dearka again. There, Yzak learned that the Freedom's pilot, who saved his life at JOSH-A, and the Strike's pilot are one and the same, and that he and Athrun were old friends. At this point, Yzak is given command of his own mobile suit team, based out of Jachin Duel. Among the pilots he selected were test pilot and fellow Le Creuset Team veteran Shiho Hahnenfuss. The two had served together through the entire war so far, and were close, though Yzak vehemently denied persistent rumors of a romantic relationship, insisting that he regards Shiho's opinions highly as a comrade in arms and no more than that. Yet it is he who gave her the nickname "Housenka" (Balsam, a genus of flower that is often called "Touch Me Not" in English) due to her combat skills, and she wears the balsam as her personal mark. It is during the Second Battle of Jachin Due, after Kira and Athrun stop an Alliance nuclear attack against the PLANTs, that Yzak makes his decision. Recognizing at last that they are not his enemy, he contacts the Freedom and Justice when the order to fire the ZAFT superweapon GENESIS is fired and warns them of the danger. Thereafter he actively aided the Three Ship Alliance by engaging their mutual enemy - the Archangel-class warship Dominion ''and its mobile suits. Yzak would personally kill two of the Alliance's Extendeds during that battle - first sacrificing the Assault Shroud to block an attack by Shani Andras before using the Duel's beam sabers to impale his machine, then by taking the Buster's hyper-impulse sniper rifle and firing it at Clotho Buer, hitting it in the cockpit and destroying it as well. It is also Yzak who, using the 175mm rocket-propelled grenade launcher mounted to the Duel's rifle, would personally shoot down the ''Doolittle, flagship of the Alliance fleet commanded by William Sutherland, killing him as well. After the end of the First Junius War, Yzak was arrested and court-martialed in connection with the incident during the Battle of Orbit. Dearka was likewise arrested for desertion, and of course Yzak's own mother had been arrested by Eileen Canaver following her actions in the last few months of the war. Facing execution, he was somewhat surprised that newly-elected Chairman Gilbert Durendal interceded on their behalf. Yzak was acquitted as the tribunal decreed that, because he was unaware of the true nature of the shuttle and the incident took place in the heat of battle, it fell into a case of tactical fog-of-war. Yzak was rehabilitated with his former rank and reformed the Joule Team. Yzak had the newly-reenlisted Dearka as well as Shiho join him, this time based off the Nazca-class ships Voltaire ''and ''Rousseau. In C.E. 75, Yzak was Durendal subsequently promoted him and gave him command of the soon-to-be-deployed new prototype battleship Minerva. He is also assigned a ZGMF-1000 ZAKU Warrior, custom-painted in his own two-tone blue colors. Before leaving, Yzak placed Shiho in overall command of the Voltaire ''and ''Rousseau in his place, and made Yzak squadron leader for the Rousseau mobile suit team. He then left for Armory One, where he would take command of the new vessel in its premature maiden voyage, the goal of which was to destroy the remains of Junius Seven before they can fall to Earth. Their second objective is to recover the Junius Seven memorial delegation, whose shuttle was on the way to Junius Seven as well. By a strange series of coincidences, his own former ships would be dispatched from the PLANTs to support him, and he would also meet again with Athrun, present under the alias "Alex Dino" as an Orb mobile suit pilot and bodyguard to Cagalli Yula Athha, who along with Chairman Durendal and several other dignitaries from Earth was part of the memorial delegation. Arriving at the site, they find the shuttle under attack from terrorists in GINN High-Maneuver Type-II mobile suits, who are responsible for dropping Junius Seven. Still haunted by his mistake at the Battle of Orbit during the war, Yzak frantically orders the Minerva and its mobile suits to protect the damaged shuttle and recover the memorial delegation, even as the battle continues and demolition efforts are made. Despite the best efforts of all three ships the operation would ultimately fail, as numerous fragments of Junius Seven fell to Earth, and the Minerva re-entered the atmosphere. Partly responsible is an unknown vessel that attacked the ZAFT ships, deploying Alliance Daggers as well as a mobile armor and two unknown new mobile suits. The Minerva makes its way to Orb for repairs, and Yzak provides Cagalli with documented evidence of the apparent Alliance attack, which she is able to use to sway the opinions of Orb's governing council in a bid to prevent then from joining the Atlantic Federation. Yzak's ZAKU is destroyed when, as the ship leaves Orb on its way to Carpentaria, they are attacked by an Alliance fleet including a gigantic new mobile armor. At Carpentaria, they are rejoined by Athrun, now a member of FAITH and pilot of the new ZGMF-X23S Saviour Gundam. Yzak is likewise made a member of FAITH, and the two share a joke about what Athrun and Yzak had promised when they had parted during the previous war, and that Yzak was indeed now the one in charge - as although both were members of FAITH, Yzak insisted that as a White Coat, he still outranked his old friend. Without a mobile suit, Yzak would command from the Minerva when the ship is attacked again by the same team they had faced in orbit as the ship crosses the Indian Ocean, then during the operation to destroy the Alliance outpost in the Gulnahan Ravine. Arriving at Bandirma, there Yzak would, during a meeting with Durendal revealed to them the existence of a secretive cabal behind the Alliance's actions in both wars called Logos, receive as replacement for his ZAKU the new ZGMF-2000 GOUF Ignited, painted two-tone blue as his ZAKU had been. Yzak would use the GOUF in two battles against a joint Orb-Alliance fleet in which the Archangel ''intervened, resulting in the death of [[Rey Za Burrel|one of the ''Minerva's pilots]] as well as severe injuries to both fellow veterans and FAITH operatives Athrun and Heine. Yzak would later command the Minerva ''during the Battle of Hamburg, personally ordering the destruction of the Atlantic Federation's land battleship ''Bonaparte. Subsequently, he is ordered to participate in Operation Angel Down, ''and devises a strategy to deal separately with the ''Archangel ''and the Freedom, engaging the former in a close-range, ship-to-ship battle while using the Impulse's capabilities to engage and defeat the Freedom, thanks to a strategy jointly devised by Shinn and Heine. The operation would be successful, as moments before the ''Archangel, ''already badly damaged by a missile strike from the ''Minerva, ''escapes to the sea, it suffers catastrophic damage when hit by a shot from the ''Minerva's positron cannon, and the Impulse succeeds in destroying the Freedom. After this operation, the ship is ordered to return to Gibraltar. At Gibraltar, the ''Minerva ''receives several new mobile suits, including two new Gundams and a team of new DOM Trooper high-speed ground combat mobile suits, one of which would become Yzak's personal unit through the end of the war.